Stephen Rowley

379 posts

A Long Trek Down a Short Pier

Film Film Reviews

Star Trek: Nemesis (Stuart Baird, 2002)

There has been a long-standing tradition that the even-numbered Trek films are good and the odd numbered ones mediocre or bad. Star Trek: Nemesis – the tenth Trek film, and almost certainly the last involving the full “Next Generation” crew – mixes enough good, bad and indifferent elements that it would have been held up as vindication of that theory whether it was been odd or even numbered. The villain of the piece is Shinzon, who has masterminded a political coup in the Romulan empire by the empire’s underclass, the Remans. Story logic would dictate that Shinzon would be Reman himself, but Nemesis is founded on twin contrivances: firstly, that Shinzon is a clone of the captain of the starship Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, and secondly, that Shinzon has somehow come into possession of a prototype for the android Data. These plot points are, on close examination, patently absurd, but they serve their purpose of providing a personal link between the villain and the hero of the piece.

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Star Wars on DVD and the Pink Panther Remake

Film

The last week or so has seen the news splash around the internet that Star Wars will arrive on DVD in September 2004, without the real question being answered: which version? Despite the breathless headlines “Original Trilogy on DVD,” nobody knows if we will in fact get the original trilogy as released in 1977 to 1983 (although those willing to take a punt have tended to state that we will get the 1997 Special Editions instead).

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Phone Home

Film Film Reviews

E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg), 1982

Accounts of the early development of, and inspiration for, Spielberg’s wonderful E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial talk of two early ideas that merged into one. The first was the idea of a thriller about aliens called Night Skies, involving aliens menacing a farmhouse, which included a subplot about an alien being left behind on Earth. The second was a nebulous idea about a film based on the life of children. The latter idea seems to have gone through many incarnations, being referred to variously as Clearwater, After School, Growing Up, and A Boy’s Life. Some of these may nominally have been considered separate projects (Clearwater seems to have been based on a treatment by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, while Growing Up was a Robert Zemeckis / Bob Gale script), but the common thread was that Spielberg wanted to do a small scale, intimate film about children. The greatness of E.T. can be linked to its origins in this premise: it works so well because it would be an interesting movie even without the alien.

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Pulpy

Film Film Reviews

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up to Reservoir Dogs is superficially in the same vein, but it expands the scope of Tarantino’s world enormously. Where Dogs was taut and focussed (telling the story of single bank robbery, with few locations and a small core of characters), Pulp Fiction is a wide-ranging journey through the low-life of Los Angeles. Its several interrelated story lines unmistakeably occur in the same world as those of Reservoir Dogs, but the film is in every way – story, messsage, form – more ambitious than Tarntino’s earlier film. It has an air of definitiveness: not just because it is a key film of its genre, but because it is the most focussed and well executed of Tarantino’s films. It enlarges and illuminates his other work.

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Before Blogs There Were Logs

Film

The Jaws Log: 25th Anniversary Edition (Carl Gottlieb, 1975 / 2001, Newmarket Press)

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As an enormous fan of Jaws, I looked forward to catching up with screenwriter Carl Gottlieb’s account of its making, and certainly it’s very valuable as the first hand account by a key participant of a particularly interesting project. Yet I was strangely disappointed by it.

Written in 1975, right after the film was made, it has been revised for the new edition through addition of a new introduction (by Peter Benchley), a foreword by Gottlieb, some great set photos, and copious endnotes that predominantly recount events since the book was first written. The result, unfortunately, has neither the strengths of a fresh eyewitness account nor a considered opinion made with the benefit of hindsight. The 1975 material (the body of the text) seems overly keen not to offend anyone, resulting in strange and inconsistent self-censorship: on page 46 Gottlieb grants anonymity to the second screenwriter on the project (Howard Sackler), apparently at Sackler’s request, but on Page 137 he goes ahead and names him regardless. He is also unrelentingly eager to promote the movie, which at the time was still in cinemas, and which the 1975 incarnation of Gottlieb tends to assume we haven’t seen. (Speaking of the mix of real and mechanical shark footage he earnestly informs us that we’ll “never be able to guess what footage was shot where.” Hmmm.)

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Too Placid

Film Film Reviews

The Rage in Placid Lake (Tony McNamara, 2003)

Writer-director Tony McNamara’s amiable but shallow coming of age film tells the story of Placid Lake (Ben Lee), who has been bullied throughout his formative years. After a particularly violent confrontation at the end of his final year of high school, he undergoes an epiphany: he needs to try to fit in to normal society. So he abandons (or at least attempts to abandon) his unconventional ways, opting to go corporate and take a menial clerical job at the Icarus insurance company.

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Half Dead

Film Film Reviews

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)

Volume 1 of Quentin Tarantino’s bisected Kill Bill is at once less than I hoped, and better than I feared. Tarantino’s first three full-length films – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown – were amongst the best films of the last decade, but the possibility loomed that Kill Bill would favour all his worst instincts. Tarantino’s stated intent was a large-scale tribute to Asian exploitation movies, and the danger with such a project was that it would leach the substance from his work and leave only the sensationalism. After all, there was the clear precedent of his 1996 collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn. That film was a tribute to lurid horror movies, and while cleverly done, it’s also a rather unpleasant and barren film. I feared Kill Bill would follow that pattern.

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Dirty Dogs

Film Film Reviews

Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)

The problem with reviewing Reservoir Dogs is that right from its release in 1992, even its detractors generally agreed what its merits were: to review it risks simply listing them. Tarantino, in his first film, had shown he had a good eye for direction, and that he could write slick dialogue that was heavily laden with pop-culture references. He was capable with actors, or at least had a good eye for casting, with the ensemble he assembled here somehow already having the feel of a repertory company (looking back, what is surprising is how few of these actors he actually went on to use in his subsequent movies). And everyone agreed he had a talent for narrative: scrambling chronologies with confidence, he had crafted a taut thriller on a low budget. This is not to say that everyone loved or even liked the film, but rather that its detractors – many of whom remain vocal over a decade later – tended to react not to Tarantino’s technical skills, but rather to the personality that they perceived the film as embodying.

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Fish

Film Film Reviews

Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton), 2003

Here’s one for those who like conspiracy theories: during 2003, Steve Jobs (head of Pixar animation studios) and Michael Eisner (head of Disney) were renegotiating the deal that allowed Disney to distribute Pixar’s films. With four straight hit films under their belts – Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, and Monsters Inc – Pixar had a strong bargaining position, and Disney expected their cut of the profit from Pixar films drastically reduced. Yet in 2002 and early 2003, rumours circulated that the upcoming Pixar movie, Finding Nemo, was not up to the standard of its predecessors. This put a small, but significant question mark over the future of Pixar – was their strong negotiation based on past glories, rather than a realistic assessment of what might be to come? Were Pixar due for a fall? Ultimately, the negotiations dragged on until Finding Nemo was released – whereupon it received universally positive reviews and eclipsed Disney’s The Lion King as the highest grossing animated film ever. Pixar’s status as the studio that could do no wrong was protected, and the cloud over the negotiations lifted. But here’s the question – could Disney possibly have started the bad buzz on Nemo to force their hand?

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